THEATER - "The Maternal Instinct"

Though prone to excess and flaky exposition, Monica Bauer’s play, The Maternal Instinct, is beautiful more often than not: a bittersweet story for anyone who’s ever wanted a baby, and anyone who’s ever been afraid of them. Sarah is the former, her wife Lillian is the latter, and Fred...well, Fred’s the only friend of the family with sperm. Their desires and frustrations are the subject of the next ninety minutes, and with the exception of the comedic sections (played too much for laughs), it’s an interesting hour and a half.

Even the play’s two cumbersome subplots manage to entertain, one intellectually, the other emotionally. The brainier of the two is about Lillian and Fred’s science experiment, an attempt to reprogram (i.e., remove) the maternal instinct. It’s a success—mice are tearing their children apart—except that Mother Courage, a lab mouse, is, by force of will, protecting its young. Dramatically, the scenes are flat, but they do re-enforce Lillian and Sarah’s situation: animals (of which people are a subset) often behave in unpredictable ways. As for the visceral subplot, Lillian, Fred, and Sarah all encounter Terry, a drunk, pregnant, semi-mute superfluity (no matter how well Elise Audrey Manning manages to portray her). These scenes are as repetitive as Terry’s one-word vocabulary, but they end up being cloyingly charming.

The Maternal Instinct rises above these tangents: the cast cushions the rocky portions of the script, and the shining moments of the text compensate for the clumsy simplicity of director Melissa J. Wentworth. Karen Woodward Massey’s performance as the conflicted Lillian makes up for any other flaws, like the lack of a real set or a faulty lighting design—substance trumps appearance any day of the week. Bauer’s play, trapped in the midst of a fringe Fringe Festival at WorkShop Theater, is proof that a good play can overcome adversity. If it makes some necessary revisions to pacing and plot, it can overcome competition, too. The Maternal Instinct deserves to come to term; now it just needs a little help from a qualified midwife.